Week 1 is in the books!
35 more to go. D'oh!
This post is really about two weeks. Week 0 is my first week back. No students are there, but teachers are at school. We are hitting meetings, writing lessons, setting up our classroom, going to required trainings, and generally trying to shake off summer. It generally went OK, until I saw the curriculum map for this year. I had a screaming fit, because this is so damn stupid.
We come back in the middle of hurricane season. It would make sense to start teaching about weather as our first major unit after we do the introductory stuff. But no. For most of my 20 years, weather has been taught during the second quarter, after it is mostly over. I have complained about this MANY times over the years. Two years ago, a fellow science teacher went to the summer workshop for our curriculum and successfully lobbied for weather to a be a first quarter topic. Then this year, I see it is now moved to THIRD quarter. When I emailed the lady downtown in charge of science, her response was “Come to the workshop next year then.”
I should be teaching about this that is happening RIGHT NOW, but no, I have to follow some stupid plan that has me doing layers of the Earth first.
NO. No you silly woman, I will not go to the workshop. Nope. Not worth my time. In over 20 years teaching here, I have managed to get them to change it to first quarter twice, then it reverts the following year, so they don’t listen anyway when I do go. Why should I have to lobby for a common sense change EVERY SINGLE YEAR? That is the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard of.
We go through dealing with all that. Then on Thursday of last week a lot of the sixth graders showed up to meet their teachers and get their schedules, but it wasn’t really Open House. I got to meet about 30-40 of my kids, which is way more than I normally see.
Then Week 1 hits. In past years they have tried “soft” opens where we start in the middle of the week or something, but this year we hit it on Monday and were off to the races.
Teaching sixth grade, the first week is usually pretty chill. The kids are scared and overwhelmed since it is now middle school, so they are well behaved. We spend the first two days doing “getting to know you” type of stuff. We talk about fire drills, active shooter drills, science fair, and other things they need to know. Then more like classroom rules and procedures, how to get to breakfast and lunch, etc. We spend time playing games and just having fun to break them in. By Wednesday we were doing content – they were learning some science vocabulary and starting to think about ideas for a science fair project.
I always have a few kids on my roster who enrolled for school but never made it. That means they moved to a different school and didn’t tell us. A few days later they drop off my roster. The fun ones are like Hailey. That poor baby – she was so confused that she was sitting in a seventh-grade class for two days until the teacher noticed. That happens. Yesterday Joel decided to go to PE instead of my science class, and it was 40 minutes before someone figured it out and sent him my way. They crack me up – wandering around just clueless the first few weeks. They remind me of Golden Retrievers - cute but derpy.
We had some first world issues. Like monitors. For years we have had dual monitors for our computers as well as the big monitor at the front of the class. It is very difficult to plan on a dinky 22” monitor, which is why we got second ones. Then over the summer they got us new desktop computers. I’m not sure what the story is, but we were initially told that we had to have a HDMI to VGA adapter that we had to buy ourselves if we wanted a second monitor. Then our tech guy here started telling us second monitors weren’t supported. Gee, that’s funny. My brother-in-law, who does the exact same job at a different school, told me that was all bullshit. His teachers got to keep their second monitors, as did the teachers at another middle school.
I attempted to clear this up with our tech guy over email, but he is so dense he couldn’t properly answer my questions. Eventually he got frustrated with me trying to clarify and he copy/pasted a district announcement about the computers and quit responding. Fine. I went and bought a cheap monitor for $70 at Walmart. The day I carried it in to work, my boss saw me and asked about it. So I told her. I’m tired of this guy, so I’m doing it myself. She wasn’t happy that I felt I had to do that and apologized to me, but it isn’t her fault. I plugged it in with the HDMI cable (no adapter) and it worked just fine. So I am left with no conclusion other than this cat is a lazy POS and/or incompetent and doesn’t know how to do his job. Regardless, I now have two monitors again, and it took me about five minutes to unbox it and set it up. I don’t like this guy anyway. All he does is bitch about his job and how he is overqualified.
The other issue is I have a LOT of kids this year on an IEP – Individual Education Plan. This is a legal document that details services special education students are to receive. For some reason, I have a statistically improbable amount of kids with ADHD. There is just no way – it’s almost 25% of my students. I’m not a doctor, but I’m going to guess a lot of them don’t have ADHD and are just fucked up over the Covid shutdown. These kids were really young when that happened. So this year should be fun. I also have been given two students who are WAY too low level to be in a general education setting. But because their paperwork from elementary was messed up, they are with me instead of in a special education classroom. What pisses me off is that it can take MONTHS to move a kid. They just flounder around and drown while waiting usually. I hope these two poor babies either get moved or are given additional support in my class, because I cannot teach them and the rest of the class at the same time - they are just too low level. Normally we can “differentiate” for kids to accommodate learning issues, but again, these two kids really need a lot more support. Every single year this happens, and I’m tired of it.
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We got an amazing program called Lightspeed. On the one day a week when my kids are on the computers doing things, it lets me see what they are doing live on the computer. So if they are off task, I know instantly. That is one reason I wanted a second monitor, so I could keep them pulled up on one screen while I work on the other. It’s been great – the kids are staying on task because they know we can watch them now. (Walking around the room didn’t work because they would open/close tabs as you came around.)
(Student names redacted) This is what I see when I look at my class in Lightspeed. I know instantly if they are off task. I’m so happy we have this.
Two of my students were suspended on the second day. They got in some trouble on the bus on the way home, and have now been in in-school suspension for a couple of days. Nothing like making a first impression on your new school I guess. They are in one of my regular education classes, which take a lot longer to get trained up as far as how to behave in middle school.
Part of the problem is they don’t discipline them in elementary really. A lot of infractions are met with “verbal counseling” that often ends with the student getting a snack and being sent back to class with no consequences, but in fact a reward. So when they get here and we tell them they have to behave, they don’t believe us. So they fuck around and find out. (By the way, that is also literally the scientific method.) Same thing with passing. The only grade they retain you in here is in 3rd, which is insane to me, and they often find workarounds for that. So they get told all of elementary they will be held back which is a blatant lie, then they get to us. We tell them, you will be held back. They don’t believe us because it never happened before despite the threats.
Names are always fun. Luckily, this year I only have a few difficult first names to pronounce, but I’ll have them straight soon. I know the names of a few kids. I remember one girl because her hair is just out of control and frizzy. I remember another girl because of the wild color in her hair. I remember one kid who wears metal shirts and can talk power rock with me. Another boy I remember as a student from last year, so I know his name. He failed with a different teacher as well as failing all of his classes, so he is repeating his sixth grade year and this time he has me. We had a talk - I think he will be OK. But with ~130 students (it fluctuates) this year, it’s going to take a bit to learn all of their names. And with my concussions and brain damage, it takes me longer. I’ll get there though, I always do.
The week is over. I am exhausted, both physically and mentally. Teaching well requires you to be animated and to perform for your students to a certain degree, and it takes a lot out of you. The first week is all that cranked up 1000%, so it is always rough when coming out of summer hibernation to be on stage like that. I’ll be OK though. Your support means a lot, so keep the kind words coming. Be good y’all.
Sometimes special education kids get placed in the wrong setting because someone just didn’t read the damn IEP- ask me how I know, lol. Middle of the first day when my kids are at PE, I get a message that’s basically “(Bloo) we’ve got another one for ya.” Normally I roll my eyes at this because a lot of gen Ed teachers think any kid with a diagnosis or stereotypical behavior belongs with me, and that’s just not true…but they bring this poor kid in and they’ve got no functional communication and physically aggressive behavior. Yeah, how was this overlooked? Granted, the IEP was quite poorly written, but still.
There’s also the fact that our esteemed Governor and his DOE has decided that no child can receive alternative assessment prior to third grade, and because most of the state of Florida doesn’t understand IDEA, they won’t allow a child to receive modified curriculum prior to third grade either. So I have this child and legally I have to teach them multiplication, but they cannot count to three on her own. (Thankfully their testing to see if they qualify for modifications is already underway.)